Commentary on Political Economy

Sunday, 14 October 2018

DECAPITATE THE CHINESE DICTATORSHIP!

Not a day, not a minute, not an instant goes past now that a new story goes round the world exposing the craven criminality, corruption and genocidal turpitude of the assassins in Beijing - chief among them of course is the Rat in Chief - the toothless disgusting Fascist Beast that goes by the name of Xi Jin Ping. A story in today's New York Times is the latest to evidence how this murderous worm ordered the genocidal policies that his Chinese Dictatorship are implementing in Xinjiang at the expense of its Muslim population and in favour of the Han race. Now the US Congress will soon use the Magnitzsky Act to bring his fellow assassins to justice IF THEY EVER SET FOOT OUTSIDE OF RATLAND!!!! Here is the piece:

The Chinese government wanted to purge the Xinjiang region of “extremist” ideas, she told her co-workers, and secular Uighurs like themselves had to support the campaign for the good of their people.

“Fully
understand that this task is in order to save your relatives and your
families,” wrote Ms. Maimaiti, a Communist Party functionary who works
on the western edge of Xinjiang, in a message that was preserved online. “This is a special kind of education for a special time.”

Her
warning is one piece of a trail of evidence, often found on obscure
government websites, that unmasks the origin of China’s most sweeping
internment drive since the Mao era — and establishes how President Xi Jinping and other senior leaders played a decisive role in its rapid expansion.

In
a campaign that has drawn condemnation around the world, hundreds of
thousands of Uighurs and other Muslim minorities have been held in
“transformation” camps across Xinjiang for weeks, months or years at a
time, according to former inmates and their relatives.

Beijing says the facilities provide job training and legal education for Uighurs and has denied carrying out mass detentions.

But
speeches, reports and other documents online offer a clearer account
than previously reported of how China’s top leaders set in motion and
escalated the indoctrination campaign, which aims to eradicate all but
the mildest expressions of Islamic faith and any yearning for an
independent Uighur homeland.

In a campaign
that has drawn condemnation around the world, hundreds of thousands of
Uighurs and other Muslim minorities have been held in “transformation”
camps across Xinjiang for weeks, months or years at a time, according to
former inmates and their relatives.

Beijing says the facilities provide job training and legal education for Uighurs and has denied carrying out mass detentions.

But
speeches, reports and other documents online offer a clearer account
than previously reported of how China’s top leaders set in motion and
escalated the indoctrination campaign, which aims to eradicate all but
the mildest expressions of Islamic faith and any yearning for an
independent Uighur homeland.

Mr. Xi has not publicly endorsed or commented on the camps, but he
ordered a major shift in policy soon after visiting Xinjiang in 2014 to
weaken Uighurs’ separate identity and assimilate them into a society
dominated by the Han majority, according to the documents.

Later, amid official reports warning the results were insufficient, Mr. Xi reassigned Chen Quanguo,
62, the hard-line party chief in neighboring Tibet, to act as the chief
enforcer of the crackdown in Xinjiang. Mr. Chen was also promoted to
the 25-member Politburo, the party leadership council that governs
China.

“What is happening in Xinjiang
is the leading edge of a new, more coercive ethnic policy under Xi
Jinping’s ‘new era’ of Chinese power,” said James Leibold, an expert on Xinjiang at La Trobe University in Australia who has monitored the campaign.

The
Trump administration is weighing sanctions against Chinese officials
and companies involved in the indoctrination camps, a move that would
extend the friction between Washington and Beijing over trade and
military disputes to human rights. A bipartisan commission has singled out Mr. Chen and six other officials as potential targets.

Last
week, apparently stung by the international criticism, the Xinjiang
government issued revised rules on “deradicalization” that for the first
time clearly authorized the indoctrination camps.

Worried
about Muslim extremism and ethnic nationalism, Beijing has long
maintained tight control of Xinjiang, where nearly half the population
of 24 million are Uighurs. In the decade up to 2014, the security forces
struggled with a series of violent antigovernment attacks for which
they blamed Uighur separatists.

Mr. Xi made his first and only visit as national leader to Xinjiang in April 2014. Hours after his four-day visit ended, assailants used bombs and knives to kill three people
and wound nearly 80 others near a train station in Urumqi, the regional
capital. The attack was seen as a rebuff to Mr. Xi, who had just left
the city and vowed to wield an “iron fist” against Uighurs who oppose
Chinese rule.

“That seems to have been taken by Xi Jinping as an affront,” said Michael Clarke, a scholar at the Australian National University who studies Xinjiang.

A month later,
Mr. Xi called for a vigorous push to make Uighurs loyal members of the
Chinese nation through Chinese-language instruction, economic incentives
and state-organized ethnic intermingling. The leadership also approved a directive on establishing tighter control of Xinjiang that has not been made public.

“Strengthen
public identification of every ethnic group with the great motherland,
with Chinese nationhood and with Chinese culture,” Mr. Xi said at a
meeting on Xinjiang at the time. “There must be more ethnic contact, exchange and blending.”

In
the year after Mr. Xi’s visit to Xinjiang, the documents show, the
party began building “transformation through education” camps to warn
Muslim minorities of the evils of religious zealotry and ethnic
separatism.

The camps were relatively small back then; many detainees were held for just a few days or weeks, official speeches and reports show. But there were no public guidelines for how they should operate.

By
taking a harder line in Xinjiang, Mr. Xi effectively endorsed a group
of Chinese scholars and officials advocating an overhaul of the party’s
longstanding policies toward ethnic minorities.

For
decades, the party kept Uighurs, Tibetans and other groups under tight
political control while allowing some room for preserving each
nationality’s language, culture and religion. The mosaic approach was
copied from the Soviet Union and made Xinjiang an “autonomous region,”
where, in theory, Uighurs enjoyed greater rights and representation.

But in the
1990s, Chinese academics advising the government began arguing that
these policies had contributed to the breakup of the Soviet Union by
encouraging ethnic separatism. To avoid similar troubles, they argued,
China should adopt measures aimed unapologetically at merging ethnic minorities into a broader national identity.

“So-called
‘ethnic elites’ must never be given an opportunity to become the
leaders of the pack in splitting the country,” said Hu Lianhe, a
researcher in this group, in a paper he co-wrote in 2010.

Mr. Hu is now a
powerful voice setting policy for Xinjiang as a senior official in the
United Front Work Department, a Communist Party agency that has claimed a
growing say over the region.

But
officials gave grimmer assessments in less prominent forums. Some said
that young Uighurs were more alienated from China than their elders;
others warned that Uighurs who had traveled to the Middle East,
sometimes to fight in Syria, were bringing back extremist ideas and
fighting experience.

Such warnings
appeared to persuade Mr. Xi and other leaders to back tougher measures.
In August 2016, they brought in Mr. Chen from Tibet to run Xinjiang. He
became the first party official to have served as the leader of both
territories.

In Tibet, another
frontier region experiencing ethnic strife, Mr. Chen had expanded the
security forces, sent party officials to live in villages and tightened
control of Buddhist monasteries and temples.

In March 2017, the regional government issued “deradicalization” rules
that gave a vague green light to expanding the internment camps, but
the national parliament never enacted a law authorizing the detentions
as would be required by the Chinese constitution. . Local officials soon
began reporting growing numbers of Uighurs arrested or detained for
indoctrination.

“Since the
strike-hard began in 2017, there have been many detainees, including
many ultimately convicted,” an official assigned to Hotan, an area in
southern Xinjiang, wrote last year. “The numbers sent to
transformation-through-education centers are also quite high.”

As
the camps and surveillance efforts expanded, Beijing directed new funds
to Xinjiang, where spending on security nearly doubled in 2017 from the
year before, to $8.4 billion, according to data released early this year.

“The central level ultimately pays for all of it, so some kind of consent was certainly given,” said Adrian Zenz, a scholar at the European School of Culture and Theology in Germany who has studied the camps.

The
scale of detentions across Xinjiang may have gone further than
initially expected. “They were having to use train stations and other
random places to hold people because they weren’t expecting to have so
many,” said Jessica Batke, a former State Department analyst.

A broad definition
of “religious extremism” — which included behavior as simple as trying
to persuade people to quit alcohol and smoking, as well as more serious
transgressions — gave the authorities wide leeway to punish even mildly
pious Muslims.

Local officials like Ms. Maimaiti had little incentive to hold back; those found dragging their feet in the crackdown have been named and punished.

The
public has been told to prepare for a long offensive, which one local
official last week called a “campaign of intellectual emancipation.” The
Xinjiang government decreed late last year that the security drive would last five years before achieving “total stability.”